It is desirable for organizations with command and control responsibilities to electronically communicate with devices in distributed geographic locations. This activity is critical in order to successfully exercise authority and direction by a properly designated operator over assigned resources in accomplishing a common goal. Issuing command and control instructions in this vein is often challenging due to devices residing in non-ideal conditions attempting to perform bi-directional network communications.
Bi-directional communications are often a prerequisite for command and control communications due to the multiple asynchronous exchanges of cryptographic keys, subsequent encrypted messaging in support of command issuance. This practice best achieves confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of the communications that satisfies organizational information assurance requirements. In order to achieve communications CIA, significant technical resources are often required and often at a great expense to the organization.
Proof-of-authority (PoA) is an algorithm used with blockchains that delivers comparatively fast transactions through a group consensus mechanism based on identity as a stake. In PoA-based networks, transactions and blocks are validated by approved accounts, known as validators. Validators run software allowing them to put transactions in blocks.
With PoA, arrays can be private instantiations and pre-designated by a trusted authority, such as the Department of Defense (DoD). Validators can be elected members that have special privileges to submit blocks to be added to the chain, which are checked by other validators. A PoA system can include a block proposer, which is anyone that hasn't submitted the previous block, and that proposed block is checked and voted on by the remaining validators. If the majority agrees on it, it is added to the chain. The validator pool can vote on adding/removing validators, which is passed by a majority vote.
Three conditions for establishing a PoA validator can be: 1) identity to be formally verified on-chain, with permissiveness to cross-check the information from that specific distribution; and 2) eligibility to be difficult to obtain; and 3) uniformity in the checks and procedures for establishing an authority.
PoA offers demonstrable differences and potential advantages from Proof of Stake (PoS), because in PoS, while a stake between two parties may be even, it does not take into account each party's total holdings. The PoS mechanism works using an algorithm that selects participants with the highest stakes as validators, assuming that the highest stakeholders are incentivized to ensure a transaction is processed. This means that incentives can be unbalanced.
PoA can also be considered an alternative to Proof of Work (PoW) because PoW uses an enormous amount of computing power, which, in itself lowers incentive. The PoW consensus uses a mining mechanism that works by verifying that work (mining) has been done before transactions are carried out. PoW is also vulnerable to attack, as a potential attacker would only need to have 51% of the mining resources (hashrate) to control a network.
On the other hand, PoA only allows non-consecutive block approval from a group of established and controlled validators, meaning that the risk of serious damage is minimized. PoA is suited for both private and public networks.